Life Cycles Are His Map To Time's Ups, Downs

August 17, 1985|By Michael Norman, New York Times

LINDEN, N.J. — Things seem to run in cycles. The days revolve dawn to dusk around the wheel of seasons. History has its ends and its beginnings, too. ''Turning and turning in the widening gyre,'' wrote Yeats. Scientists track the loop of life and death. And poets, like Wallace Stevens, spend their time spinning: ''Yet that things go round and again go round has a rather classical sound.''

Why, then, should anyone doubt Michael Zahorchak? ''Either we've been conned and the greatest thinkers in the world are fools,'' he said, ''or there is something to the idea of cycles and we, in our arrogance, choose to ignore it.''

Zahorchak, a writer and a former executive at the American Stock Exchange, is a member of the Society for the Investigation of Recurring Events, a group with a keen interest in things cyclical, from trends in the stock market to sleep cycles.

There is nothing mystical or astrological about cycle theorists. Many of them are hardheaded businessmen looking for an edge in the market or, at least, a way to make an informed guess about its direction.

For Zahorchak, however, the study of cycles has become a way of life. Several years ago he discovered the work of Raymond H. Wheeler, a psychology professor who believed that all social behavior is related to climate, that climate is cyclical and can be predicted, and, finally, that it is possible therefore to make reasonable assumptions about the future.

Wheeler died before he could publish his findings. His research -- thousands of pages of charts and facts and theory papers -- was passed on to one of his students, who, in turn, has fed the material to Zahorchak, a modern Boswell spreading Wheeler's word.

Today, the word is being offered over a cheeseburger and a salad at a local restaurant. First, Zahorchak contends that temperature and rainfall affect the body and the mind.

On hot humid days, he says, people are lethargic. On a cool day in April, he goes on, they are full of vigor.

In short, ''vitality and aggressiveness'' decrease in midwinter and midsummer, when temperatures are at their extremes, he says, and revive in the fall and the spring. Therefore, he concludes, man is at his intellectual best when the weather is temperate.

Next, from a study of tree rings and sun spots and weather reports, he asserts, it is possible to chart cycles in the world's weather back to 600 B.C., discovering along the way those periods when it has been hotter or colder, wetter or drier than normal.

These fluctuations have occurred regularly at measurable intervals, the most important of which is the hundred-year cycle, he says.

It is best to think of this cycle, according to Zahorchak, in terms of seasons -- it begins with a springlike period of weather that is warmer and wetter than usual and ends with a winterlike period that is colder and drier than usual.

During the temperate, springlike, warm-wet phase of the hundred-year cycle, he argues, man is at his best and civilization has flourished with prosperity, enlightened leadership and a proliferation of the arts and sciences.

During the cold-dry, winterlike phase, he asserts, the psyche often turns on itself, economies stagnate, dictators emerge, chaos and anarchy reign. In short, to borrow from Yeats, ''Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.''

American society, in Zahorchak's view, has just emerged from the winter of a hundred-year cycle.

''It began in the 1960s,'' he said, ''when all of a sudden you had extremes in irrational behavior, students marching in the streets, Johnson with his insistence on guns and butter, business trying to make irrational acquisitions.

''There were situations that tested the very foundations of society: protests by blacks and women. This forced society to look at itself. Institutions that were weak either changed or went under. This prepared us for the start of a new cycle, new freedoms and new ways of looking at one another.''

Now for the spring of the cycle and the advent of another golden age. Interest rates, he predicts, will go down, strong leadership will come to government and more emphasis will be placed on the arts and the humanities.

All of this, of course, is a simplified version of a detailed plan for life that has at its root the notion that if someone knows the cycles, long and short, and can make adjustments in his behavior, he won't get hurt.

In other words, sell when the market is up and don't write poetry when everyone else wants to read prose.

Tree rings and sun spots and Wheeler's word aside, the theory of cycles is really a call for reason, a belief that the way to answer the question ''What is next?'' is to look at what has passed and what is present.

''A lot of people say there's no valid scientific evidence for what you are saying and we won't accept it,'' Zahorchak said. ''I just try to get as close to the soul of something as I can. I'm willing to say, 'I'll go by it because, what the heck, maybe it's true.' I have less disappointments this way than waiting for the facts.''

And with this talk of skeptics, the conversation has come back on itself and it is time to end or go around again. Zahorchak picks up a doggie bag containing his half-eaten cheeseburger and walks out into the parking lot, making for his car in what seems a very roundabout way.